Thursday, 13 August 2015

Funding Support for Students with Mental Health Difficulties

A
report has been produced for the Higher Education Funding Council for England
(HEFCE): Understanding
provision for students with mental health problems and intensive support needs.
It considers the recent dramatic increase in demand for mental health services
among university students and how these services are currently funded and
provided. The report comes at a time of imminent changes to government funding
for disabled students. The government is instigating changes that will mean
that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) will be expected to provide a greater
level of support to students, in line with reasonable adjustment expected under
the Equality Act, while government funding (through the Disabled Students
Allowance, DSA) will focus on support provision for those with greater needs. This
may provide an opportunity to improve how support for students experiencing
mental health difficulties is provided and funded. However, the report suggests
that no one really seems to know what implications these changes will actually
have, either in the short or longer term.

I
have summarised this report, to provide a concise overview, available here (http://www.studentminds.org.uk/dsa-consultation).
In this blog I would like to share some personal reflections and concerns about
the future of funding for student support. Through the blog I consider the
challenge that linking funding for student support to long-term conditions
creates for provision of responsive mental health services and reflect on the
implications of limited NHS mental health provision for students and HEIs.

Mental
health exists on a continuum; we all have mental health and our mental health
can fluctuate. However, the current structure of DSA funding cannot accommodate
this fluctuation. While the report encourages HEIs to be proactive in their
support for student mental health (through developing inclusive curricula and
proactive measures, such as wellbeing and resilience initiatives), interviewees
for the report reflect a combination of hope that the changes to DSA funding
will help HEIs adopt a more social model of mental health and fears that it
will push HEIs further towards a medical model of mental health. The social
model of mental health proposes that individual mental health problems may have
their root in social circumstances and experiences of trauma. The model
recognises that anyone can suffer distress and repositions mental health as a
social construct, not a purely individual concern. Currently however, even when
informed by a social model, student services are “typically
delivered on the basis of individual models… of mental health”.

As
mental health fluctuates, I am concerned about the current situation of funding
being linked to long-term problems. As one interviewee for the report
highlights, mental health difficulties can be acute and require a rapid
response “… it may be fine to wait 12/15 weeks under
certain circumstances, but if you’re working with someone who is a young person
who doesn’t have a lot of life skills, is away from home for the first time,
that can be calamitous.”In the university environment, mental
health can decline dramatically and have a substantive, negative impact on a
student’s ability to study; “taking vulnerable people
away from their personal support networks and then giving them a massive amount
of academic pressure is ‘a potent cocktail’.’’

I
arrived at university with a track record of mental health difficulties. I had
experienced an eating disorder for years. I was however, very much in recovery.
For me, I was doing very well. I did struggle. There were periods of time at
university when I was self-harming to manage my anxiety levels. In my second
year I started having panic attacks and developed an acute case of agoraphobia.
I was fortunate to have a family who could support me and I left university
early in the run up to a vacation to visit my family GP and take time at home
to “unwind” and reset. Out of the university environment my anxiety subsided
rapidly.

I
did not hide my mental health difficulties. My friends and housemates knew that
at times I was struggling and this in itself was helpful. I did not talk about
my anxiety with tutors as it never seemed relevant, nonetheless, my tutors were
incredibly supportive and intensive academic encouragement through my final
year of studies had a very positive impact on my mental health. Could I have
benefited from counselling or mentoring? Yes. I’m sure it would have helped.
But for the university to have provided me with a mentor, I would have had to
apply for the DSA. In my eyes, I was not disabled. Even in the depths of my
eating disorder I would have found it difficult identifying as disabled. At
university I would have said that I was simply adjusting and learning to manage
my mental health.

Funding
to support students with mental health difficulties is currently linked to the DSA
and the Equality Act, which requires reasonable adjustments to be made to
ensure that individuals with a disability have equal access to education. I
understand that disability is defined as an enduring condition, spanning years.
However, from my own experience, I am fundamentally uncomfortable with
conceptualising mental health difficulties as disabilities. Tying mental health
to the framework of disability seems to suggest that mental health difficulties
are long-term, if not permanent. This is in direct contrast with recovery
models that focus on change.

According
to the report demand for mental health support has increased. However, by
linking mental health difficulties and disability, capturing this demand is
challenging[1].
Across all institutions, the portion of students who have declared a mental
health problem is 1.4%. This is a dramatic under-representation of the number
of students experiencing mental health difficulties and there is an awareness
that more needs to be done to encourage students to disclose. 1.4% needs to be
viewed in context; within a year 25% of British adults will experience at least
one diagnosable mental health difficulty and at some universities, counselling
services are seeing nearly 10% of the student population.

The
discrepancy in these numbers is important because the funding that a university
receives to support students is linked directly to the number of students receiving
the DSA. There is a huge gap between the number of students experiencing mental
health difficulties and the number receiving support through the DSA. To receive
the DSA, a student experiencing mental health difficulties has to recognise and
accept this. They then have to identify themselves as disabled and choose to
disclose their mental health difficulties as a disability. This is challenging
enough. However to claim the DSA a student’s mental health difficulty has to
have a long-term adverse effect on
his or her ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities or study. Long-term
here is defined as a problem that has persisted for over a year. As such, of
the small proportion of students who have declared a mental health difficulty,
only 33% receive the DSA.

So
the question to ask is how are universities funding support services for
student mental health? Student Services, including counselling services, are
funded by core university funding, including student fees and funding from
HEFCE in the form of the Student Opportunity disability allowance (a
non-ring-fenced allocation of funding linked to the number of students claiming
DSA). The report identifies that institutions are topping up funding from the
SO disability allowance by £2 to £5 for every £1 received.

It
could be argued that as HEIs are institutions for education and not health
care, they should not be expected to provide any form of counselling or support
beyond that provided for students in receipt of the DSA. After all, students
should be able to access support for mental health difficulties through the
National Health Service.

However,
mental health has an effect on ability to study. A recent
study found that, of the students attending one university counselling
service, 92% identified themselves as having problems with their academic work.
Of those students, interviewed on conclusion of counselling, 67% considered
that it had been important in enabling them to address those issues. Further, acute
mental health difficulties, if not addressed quickly, can have a substantive
impact on a student’s ability to study, having a direct influence on the HEI’s
ability to meet its responsibility regarding education. One GP points out that
if a young adult loses three or four weeks of their academic year, they will
struggle not to slip back a whole year if they have problems. Students usually
have to wait 12 to 14 weeks for mental health support through the NHS.

The
report identifies that HEIs see their responsibility around mental health as
helping with academic management, offering short-term support around managing
the impact that a student’s condition has on their studies (or longer-term
support supported by DSA funding). HEIs rightly state that they are not a ‘therapeutic community’ or the ‘5th
emergency service’. While they are not a medical service and
cannot provide medical support to students, they are often left providing
‘holding support to students.’ Extensive waiting lists within the NHS are
leading some GPs to “refer individuals back to
their HEIs for support.”

This
echoes concerns that Student Minds has been raising through the Transitions Campaign regarding
health inequality experienced by students, due to a lack of recognition in the
NHS about the needs and circumstances of students regarding mental health. The
NHS mental health provision is predicated on people living with their family
and having support at home. “There is somehow the belief
that we’re a therapeutic community and one of the discussions I’ve had
repeatedly over the years with psychiatric units, with psychiatric teams is,
would you have discharged this individual to a bedsit in the centre of the
city? And if their answer is no, then why have they discharged them in exactly
the same way to the university?”

In
2014 the government published a policy paper, “Closing
the Gap: Priorities for essential change in mental health” and the then
Deputy Prime Minister hosted a conference. This gave me the opportunity to ask
why students, as a population at high risk of developing mental health
difficulties, did not feature once in the paper. In reply, the Deputy Prime
Minister asked “surely the provision of support for students is the
Universities’ responsibility?”

It
seems, from the recent report for HEFCE, that universities are picking up this
responsibility, holding and supporting students who should be seen by the NHS,
despite the universities’ firm belief that they are not a medical service. Universities
seem to be providing this relief to the NHS without any related government
funding, and a recent study demonstrates that University support services
really are masking a substantive gap in primary care provision. The
study compared students attending counselling services at 11 universities
with a similar non-student population receiving primary care services. The
study found that university counselling services deliver a service to people
who closely resemble NHS primary care service users in terms of severity and
the risks that they pose to themselves. They concluded that, student
counselling services are “providing considerable
relief from a potential additional burden on primary health care.”

The
report reflects considerable frustration on the part of GPs. The Student Health
Association, the national body
representing health professionals that work with students, are currently
working with NHS England to try to find a better way to fund young people’s
health through a national approach. In a climate when the NHS and universities
are under more pressure than ever and the government is making decisions about
the resourcing of mental health services, it’s crucially important that
students are fully represented in the discussion. In recent restructuring of
Student Services, some universities, including the Universities of Leeds and
Southampton, have bought mental health services (IAPT) onto the university
campus, creating explicit links between services provided by the University and
by the NHS. This seems to be an interesting way forward.

I
would like to side with the hopeful; staying optimistic that changes in funding
will help HEIs adopt a more social model of mental health, creating more space
to support the fluctuations of health. I hope that the fantastic work that
Mental Health Advisers have done over the recent years will continue to be
developed and built upon and that HEIs can support those with long-term
conditions to thrive, whether they identify as disabled or not, while also
increasing capacity to reach out to those experiencing acute difficulties.

Student Minds are interested in hearing your
views on the findings of this report and want to better understand the
direction that various stakeholders in the sector believe support for students
should be heading. Today we’ve launched a consultation and invite any students,
staff, health professionals or other concerned parties to share your views: www.studentminds.org.uk/dsa-consultation

[1]
The report acknowledges that mental health, as a subset of disability, has
received limited research attention leading to a general lack of data and
understanding.

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The Student Minds blog is the UK's biggest blog on student wellbeing and mental health. We believe students should have a place to speak up about their experiences of living with mental health difficulties and show others that they are not alone. If you're a student, or recent student, with an experience you want to share, or tips on how to deal with the different challenges that uni life brings, get in touch.

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Student Minds is the UK’s student mental health charity. We empower students and members of the university community to look after their own mental health, support others and create change. Find out more here.